I'll look at the blog stats for the year first.
Only 1,300 visitors this year. That's down from COVID 2020 when I had tons of teachers and suddenly-homeschooling parents looking for book-related resources. Still, I think it's still pretty darn good, considering I added Instagram posts this year (and I still have no idea what I'm doing there). Most of my readers are from the US, and my teaching posts are still the most widely read.
My Goodreads reviews are my best referral channel, however.
My review stats were up as well to more than 190 books this year, although the number of pages I read in December was down from 2020, when I tackled books 1-5 of Shannon Messenger's Keeper series. ;-)
Because my blog uses Strikingly's free templates, and doesn't have the "Search" function, I got a little more saavy this year and added monthly preview posts with compilation images of the books I planned to review. I got better at making them as the year progressed. I started in February with Black History / Heritage Month and continued throughout the year. It's a feature I plan to keep doing in 2022. It's highly effective for posting in FB, Twitter and Instagram.
This was also the year I started photographing books with fabrics and changed the title of my blog to The Fabric of Words. Each represents a wonderful project -- a lap quilt, a bag, a backpack, support pillows for oncology patients, COVID facemasks -- I sewed for loved ones, charities and friends.
February 2021 Reads
In addition, this is the first year I interviewed indie published authors. The key is finding and reading indie-pubbed middle grade books that are on par with traditionally published ones. They're proving a bit harder to find than I initially thought they would, but as I find more authors, I'll endeavour to spotlight them in 2022.
I'm going to cut back on reviews in 2022 to focus on my own middle grade manuscript, and my adult amateur sleuth murder mystery.
Looking forward to 2022!
